Knights of the Black and White Book One

That, unfortunately—and this had been the theme of the conversation that had held Hugh so enthralled—had given rise to an astonishingly widespread perception among the populace that the newly titled Knights of the Hospital should take it upon themselves to look after not merely the health and welfare of the pilgrims but their physical safety and well-being, too, by taking arms against the bandit marauders who infested the hills along the major roads. But of course, the knights were Benedictine monks, bound to pacifism by tradition, the dictates of the Church, and their holy vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Their knighthood was merely an honorary entitlement; they could not fight as true knights because they were both monastics and ecclesiastics.

The Knights of the Hospital were being dragged into the political considerations of the kingdom nevertheless, and that fact, and the reasons surrounding it, was the major bone of contention in the debate that night. One of the monks was far angrier than his fellows, incensed by the latest information he had received that very day. The King, it appeared, was talking seriously about attracting settlers to his new kingdom, promising them land and water rights if only they would come. New settlers: that was something unheard of until now in Outremer. There were pilgrims aplenty, passing through the land at all times and in all weathers, but they were all transient by definition, on their way to somewhere else. Settlers, on the other hand, would give up everything they owned in other parts of the world in order to travel to Jerusalem and take up residence there, farm the land, and set down roots. They were to be cherished and encouraged by every means available.

The monk’s anger had nothing to do with the settlers themselves. He was completely in support of that initiative. What had infuriated him was the news that the King remained unwilling to commit any of his troops to cleaning up the travel routes and making the roads safe for the very settlers he hoped to attract. How, the monk demanded, could any sane person expect farmers, simple, peaceful, hardworking men with wives and children, to assume the risk of bringing those families into a place where their lives would be in constant, daily jeopardy?

There were those among the monk’s own group who sought reasons to justify the King’s position, and back and forth the argument went, with a few of the knights muttering that they might one day be tempted to take up the sword, if things grew bad enough. But the consensus was that little was likely to be done about the bandits until the eventual, and some thought inevitable, emergence of a new law-enforcement group, probably mercenary in structure, that would be dedicated solely to making the roads of Jerusalem safe for travelers.

Hugh had fallen off to sleep that night with a half smile on his lips, occasioned by the naïve optimism of the Hospital knights in their hope for a corps of high-principled mercenaries. He had been in the Holy Land long enough by then to find the mere notion of an altruistic motivation, on the part of anyone at all in this harsh land, to be laughable, and nothing he had heard that night had made him think otherwise.

He had admired the brethren of the Hospital unequivocally ever since that night, however, and he believed wholeheartedly that they deserved any assistance that could be rendered them in their work, so he was glad to see that the guards awaiting him that morning as he approached the hospital were alert and conscientious. He introduced himself and stated his business, and the senior guard directed him inside with instructions on where to go and whom to ask for.

In a surprisingly short time, Hugh and Arlo were standing over a cot containing a man who seemed at first glance far too small to be the Godfrey St. Omer they both remembered. It was he, nevertheless, and both men immediately found themselves struggling to conceal the shock of seeing him in such condition. He was emaciated, shriveled and wasted from lack of proper food, but there was no mistaking his gladness at the sight of them, for he smiled and stirred weakly, his lips drawing back from his teeth in a skeletal grin.

“Goff, old friend.” De Payens leaned over the bed and squeezed St. Omer’s hand gently. “By God, it’s wonderful to see you.” He watched as St. Omer nodded his head, and then he waved to indicate Arlo. “You probably wouldn’t recognize this old fraud, after so long a time, but it’s Arlo … fatter and balder and older, like all the rest of us.” St. Omer smiled again and raised a frail and languid hand to wave, but Hugh interrupted him before he could begin to say anything. “Don’t try to speak. We’re here now, so your troubles are all over. We came as soon as we received your message, and now we’ll make arrangements to take you back to Jerusalem with us. You’ll be much better off there, you’ll see. It’s changed a great deal since last you saw it.” He realized that he was babbling, and so he bade his old friend wait a little while longer and set out, followed by Arlo, to find the man in charge of the Jericho hospital.

As it turned out, their timing could not have been better. The monks had been working for the previous seven days to assemble a caravan, including a large party of returning knights, to travel to Jerusalem, carrying the sickest of their charges to where they could obtain better care in the larger Jerusalem facility, and preparations were being completed that day. The caravan would depart at sunrise the following day, but the brethren had only five horse-drawn wagons capable of making the journey and every inch of space within them had long since been allocated to people far sicker than Godfrey. Undismayed, de Payens and Arlo spent the better part of the day searching for another wagon and eventually found a two-wheeled cart drawn by a single horse, the only vehicle left available in Jericho. Its bed was roomy enough to hold two people lying side by side on deep-piled straw, and it could be protected from the sun by a cloth awning, stretched between hoops that slotted into the sides of the vehicle. Its owner refused to sell the cart, but since Hugh did not need it for longer than the single journey, he arranged to hire it, with its owner-driver, for the length of time required to drive it to Jerusalem, and the driver, knowing that Sir Hugh himself would be riding as escort to his friend, agreed to the knight’s terms without a deal of argument.

THREE (#uee30750c-e2f0-5c8e-9b30-bfec832d73a1)

Hugh and Arlo were back in their own quarters in Jerusalem within five days, having left St. Omer safely installed in the ancient hospice in the monastery of Saint John the Baptist, close by the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where the Hospitallers would keep him under close watch and nurse him back to full health. Despite his weakened condition, however, and much to Hugh’s surprise, St. Omer had been strong enough on the journey to tell them the story of his misadventure with the followers of Mohammed and his stay among them, chained to an oar on a corsair’s galley.

They had covered less than half the twenty-mile distance that first day, constrained by the need to travel slowly for the comfort of the sick and injured men in the six wagons, but they were a strong, well-armed party, and no one had any worries about braving the dangers of the night ahead as they set up camp along the road. Hugh and Arlo had lifted St. Omer’s stretcher down from the wagon bed and placed him near their cooking fire, and after their meal, fortified with a draft of wine from the full skin Arlo had brought with him, St. Omer had begun to talk.

“I want to ask you something,” he said, his voice whispery and fragile. “When you first went home to Payens, after the first campaign, did you find it utterly different?”

“Different?” Hugh thought about that for a few moments, looking over to where Arlo sat watching them. “Aye, now that I come to think of it, I did. What makes you ask that?”

St. Omer nodded, barely moving his head, and muttered, “Because I did, too, but I thought I might be the only one. None of the others seemed to feel that way.”

Hugh sat musing for a moment longer, then frowned. “I don’t think it was home that had changed, Goff, not really. It was me …”

“Me too.” St. Omer drew several deep breaths, then began again, speaking clearly but very quietly. “I had nothing in common with any of … any of my old friends who had not been out there with us. And I couldn’t talk to any of them about what it had been like, at Antioch or any of the other places. They all wanted to know … but I couldn’t tell them. I didn’t want to talk about it, because … because I knew they couldn’t imagine … the reality of it. And besides, all they wanted to hear was what they thought they knew already. The priests had told them everything they needed to know about the glorious Holy War, and anything I tried to say, at the start of things, anything that seemed to … to contradict the priests shocked and frightened them. They did not really want to hear what I … what I had to say, Hugh.”

Hugh had been nodding his head from time to time as he listened, and now he reached out and gripped St. Omer by the wrist. “I learned the same things, just as quickly as you did, but by then you had gone home to Picardy and I was stuck in Payens.”

“I had to go, as soon as I got home. I had no choice, as you know. Louise was sick and I had … I had been away from her too long … She died eight years ago, in ’08. Did you know that?”

“No, my friend, but I suspected it, for I have not heard from her since then, and she was a great writer of letters. I knew that only death or grave infirmity could stop her from writing to me. Where is she buried? Did you take her home to Champagne?”

St. Omer’s headshake was barely discernible. “No. She rests in the garden of our home in Picardy … She loved it there. Did you hear … Have you heard of your father?”

“No. What of him? Is he dead, too?”

“Aye … soon after you set sail to return here. He had … he had no will to live without your mother …”